Your “External Devices”

The second kind of Habit consists of all your interactions with everything directly connected to you that isn’t actually you. There are many such angles to consider, but I will highlight storage, networking, and virtualization as examples.

Storage#

Modern CPUs have a series of caches, from L1 to RAM. The further away you go, the slower the speed of recall. This is loosely analogous to the human forgetting curve. For true, persistent, durable storage, we need to store our information on hard disks.

Write a lot#

For humans, the most efficient form of this is writing. Therefore the habit of writing a lot helps you increase the bandwidth of everything you communicate to your future self and the outside world. This seems costly in terms of times, but remember that the speed of most algorithms is drastically improved with just a little bit of memoization and judiciously stored data structures. Even context switching becomes a lot cheaper!

Build a second brain#

Your current brain is good, but see what happens when you build a “second brain” that does everything your first is bad at!

Networking#

Computers became a lot more interesting once they started talking to other computers. In fact, there’s a rule for just how much more interesting: Metcalfe’s Law says the value of your network grows quadratically! This is why you are well served spending time building your network, including outside of your current company. Whatever you choose, whether open-sourcing your knowledge, speaking at conferences, or marketing yourself, will help.

Learning in public#

Learning in public is so powerful precisely because it lets you do both storage and networking at the same time, with a built-in infinite feedback loop.

Virtualization#

Finally, many apps are easier to run inside virtualized containers, where a constrained environment helps provide better reliability and scalability. In the same way, you can make your environment conducive to your productivity. Use an applied understanding of psychology to turn yourself indistractable, offering some process isolation from the diversions of our modern attention economy.

Don’t over complicate your work rituals – start with simple tricks like the Pomodoro Technique and work your way up. Learn the impacts of your work environment on your own productivity and satisfaction. Remote workers universally report much better productivity when they have a clear separation between where they work and where they sleep. Don’t run “work apps” in your “home container,” and don’t intermix personal affairs with work!